Quotes About Progress

Whenever they decided to do a bit of extra work – say, to hoe the fields instead of scattering seeds on the surface – people thought, 'Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won't have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.' It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan.

Las nuevas tareas agrícolas exigían tanto tiempo que la gente se vio obligada a instalarse de forma permanente junto a sus campos de trigo. Esto cambió por completo su modo de vida. No domesticamos el trigo. El término "domesticar" procede del latín domus, que significa "casa". ¿Quién vive en una casa? No es el trigo. Es el sapiens.

Companies such as Mindojo are developing interactive algorithms that will not only teach me maths, physics and history, but will simultaneously study me and get to know exactly who I am.

Yuval Noah Harari

Consequently, from the very advent of agriculture, worries about the future became major players in the theatre of the human mind.

New technologies kill old gods and give birth to new gods.

Wheat and goats were domesticated by approximately 9000 BC; peas and lentils around 8000 BC; olive trees by 5000 BC; horses by 4000 BC; and grapevines in 3500 BC.

Yuval Noah Harari

in the past people had to exert great effort and undergo years of hard moral training in order to overcome their anger, their hatred, and their dangerous passions. But now, if your anger or passion threatens to overwhelm you, all you need to do is swallow a few pills. "Anybody can be virtuous now," concludes Mustapha. "You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle.

Humans were always far better in inventing tools than using them wisely.

the last 100,000 years – with the rise of Homo sapiens – that man jumped to the top of the food chain.

Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it's hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.

We don't need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death. A couple of geeks in a lab can do it. If traditionally death was the speciality of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over.

Similarly, if in 2070 you tell the lower classes that they enjoy better healthcare than in 2017, it might be very cold comfort to them, because they would be comparing themselves to the upgraded superhumans who dominate the world.

In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products - you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.

For men of science, death is not an inevitable destiny, but merely a technical problem.

The world's first commercial railroad opened for business in 1830, in Britain. By 1850, Western nations were criss-crossed by almost 25,000 miles of railroads

Unfortunately, what was good for survival and reproduction in the African savannah a million years ago does not necessarily make for responsible behaviour on twenty-first-century motorways

Sin la industrialización de la agricultura, la revolución industrial urbana no habría podido tener lugar: no habría habido manos y cerebros suficientes para llenar fábricas y oficinas.

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The danger is that if we invest too much in developing AI and too little in developing human consciousness, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans. We

In] the twenty-first century, you can hardly afford stability. If you try to hold on to some stable identity, job or world view, you risk being left behind as the world flies by you with a whooooosh. Given that life expectancy is likely to increase, you might subsequently have to spend many decades as a clueless fossil. To stay relevant - not just economically, but above all socially - you will need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvent yourself, certainly at a young age like fifty.

If some politicians don't understand these questions, or if they constantly talk about the past without being able to formulate a meaningful vision for the future, don't vote for them.

Its principal tenet is that economic growth is the supreme good, or at least a proxy for the supreme good, because justice, freedom and even happiness all depend on economic growth.